 | 'Brian Wilson, Minister of State, claimed Labour had run a vigorous, upfront campaign in contrast to its 'phantom opponents,' a suggestion which ran counter to the experience of most journalists present.' Murray Ritchie in the Herald, 22 nd November 2000. |  |
Garscadden itself long ago evolved into Anniesland, but to the outsider the appearance of the constituency is much the same today, a place where Glasgow's habit of enforcing social apartheid is at its starkest, where the West End rich camp is only a street or so from the poor - Drumchapel menacing Bearsden, Kelvindale lording it over Maryhill.
Donald Dewar won the Garscadden contest which was seen then as a strategic triumph over Nationalism.
A trawl through some nicotine-tinted cuttings jolts a few memories. In those days, we still had the Scottish Labour Party. Remember it? The one true and original Scottish Labour Party - beware of latter day imitations - as invented by Jim Sillars, Alex Neil, and Bob Brown, and destroyed in short order by parasitical Trots.
In the event, the SLP attracted only 583 votes. The candidate was Mrs Shiona Farrell, now Shona Waldron, who has herself evolved into a New Labour supporter.
Garscadden also had a Communist - remember them, too? Sammy Barr had been one of the famous group of UCS shop stewards led by Jimmy Reid and the late Jimmy Airlie. He fared almost as well as Ms Farrell, with 407 votes. Bottom came the Socialist Workers' Party with 166 votes. A hotbed of radicalism Garscadden was not.
What was most remarkable was the turnout of 69% - far higher than the likely show on Thursday. In those days we had only three or four television channels and broadcasters still moved people to vote. This week it would not be a shock if fewer than half of Anniesland's voters chose to abandon Who Want's to be a Millionaire? to do their democratic duty.
Much else is different. Iain Lawson was the Tory candidate who had won his party's nomination-cum-poisoned chalice having been only 25 votes away from a lost deposit at the General Election. He did well - the Tories were still a fighting force then in Scotland - to increase his share of the vote to 20% after Teddy Taylor, another blast from the past, had conspired with him to put the skids under the SNP.
Keith Bovey was the fast-talking lawyer who carried the Nationalist banner, but who also got himself into trouble with the SNP's defence policy. Lawson, now a high-profile Nationalist himself, still chuckles at the memory of how he and Taylor plotted to leak a copy of a letter from Bovey to Bill Clark, the Herald's erstwhile political correspondent.
It outlined an SNP plan to make Yarrows build fishing boats instead of warships in line with the party's anti-nuclear convictions. "The guys at Yarrows were trained to MoD standards," recalls Lawson. "They'd have been making the world's most expensive fishing boats."
Bovey does not want to talk now about the 1978 campaign. "I've nothing left to say about it," he said grumpily. In fact he fared very respectably, winning a third of the vote and forcing a 3.6% swing from Labour - whose candidate was, of course, Donald Dewar.
As ever Dewar thought at the last moment he was going to lose. A certain Brian Wilson, writing for the Observer, recalled Dewar peeking out of his window on polling day and finding a blizzard. "If I had a dog I would have kicked it," he said later. But he won with a surprising 4500 majority, halting the relentless progress of the SNP in the 1970s.
-Nov 21st
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